


a little less lethal weapon 3 (a little more touch me)

by kamisado



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Alcohol, Copious amounts of alcohol - Freeform, Drunken Flirting, F/M, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Scars, pre-charges and specs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-02
Updated: 2019-10-02
Packaged: 2020-11-15 08:13:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20863046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kamisado/pseuds/kamisado
Summary: “It’s a real problem,” she chokes out, trying not to let her mind linger on the memory of her fingers tracing the barely perceptible stripe down his back, trying to forget where it dips into the taut muscle between his shoulders, surprisingly strong from all the years of police calisthenics.[jake and amy get drunk and compare scars. pre-season 1 finale]





	a little less lethal weapon 3 (a little more touch me)

**Author's Note:**

> title from fall out boy's 'a little less sixteen candles'. inspired by [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNOsA4nH8yE) wonderful scene from lethal weapon 3.
> 
> takes place before the season one finale, charges and specs.

It’s late, and Hank’s thrown them out of Shaw’s. Everyone else has gone home already, Holt and Terry first, before things kicked off, then Boyle had to be escorted away, waved off into a cab, soon followed by Gina, and eventually, reluctantly, Rosa.

Jake’s had a couple, the perennially happy drunk, smiling and raising a glass to everyone and everything he can see, and had to be cut off after trying to toast to the used slice of lime from Rosa’s tequila. 

Amy’s had more than a couple herself, but it’s been a good day at work, a _really _good day for a change. Days like today made her feel more proud of her job than ever, taking out the kingpin of a drug ring, the arrest rippling through the city’s coke supply. Although Jake got smacked in the face during the takedown, which worried her for a start, his melodramatic posturing about it for the rest of the day earned him a distinct lack of sympathy.

It’s become this tradition now, sharing a cab back, stopping at hers, then looping back to his. It’s not cheaper by any means, but it means when it’s late and they’re wasted, they know they’re both gonna make it home okay.

“God, Jake, your face’s a mess,” Amy says, squinting at the purpling bruise spreading up his cheek. Up close, the swollen skin looks painful, and she feels a flicker of guilt in her stomach for making fun of him earlier. She leans towards him, trying to get a closer look with each passing streetlamp flicker, emboldened by the beer working its way into her bloodstream.

“Wouldn’t want some perp’s elbow to ruin my dashingly handsome face now?” he says lightly, turning his cheek towards her for a better look. She can see from how still he is that he’s conscious of how close they are and she’s all too aware how easy it would be to close that gap. Even though she’s tipsy, she knows she needs to tread carefully. “Anyway, _I_ think it makes me look rugged. Injured in the line of duty after all, blah blah, the ladies dig bruises.”

Amy scoffs loudly, settling back in her seat.

“Pfft, you call that a bruise, Peralta? That’s nothing!” She pulls up the leg of her crumpled pantsuit to reveal a discolored welt on her calf, nauseous shades of yellow and purple against the smoothness of her skin. Jake peers closely at the dark mottled smudge, with the same look of grim fascination he wears at a gruesome crime scene.

“Damn, Santiago,” he says, eyebrow raised, looking up at her as she sits back smugly.

“Got slide-tackled by a perp, straight outta nowhere.” It had been two days ago, and it still ached like hell, and the EMT was surprised she hadn’t broken anything, but the limp was barely perceptible now and she needed to brag about it somehow. “You can almost see the bootprint.” She sounds almost wistful as she rolls her pants leg back down, and Jake sits back up again, nodding appreciatively.

“I mean, if we’re going for shit that came outta nowhere, I’d like to present to you, Exhibit number A, road rash.” He’s rolling up his shirt-sleeve, and she thinks she might have seen this one before, the bumpy scar tissue over his elbow and up his bicep, catching in the yellow sodium lights as they snatch by. Learning how to trick-fall in the Academy localized the damage, she reckons.

“Got hit by a perp, was chasing his accomplice across the road.” She peers at the scarring, taking his elbow and lifting it up to the passing light.

“You got hit by a car?” she says, incredulously, wondering why he’d never bothered to mention this before. This scarring looks kinda old, and she’s sure that being hit by a perp while chasing another would be up there on Jake’s Badass Detective Stories playbook.

“I mean, no, but-”

“Wait, I mean, what else was the perp driving? I mean, it can’t have been a truck, or a bus, ‘cus then I’d definitely have heard about it. Was it a motorcycle-” That would explain the limited damage, but not the way Jake suddenly pulls his elbow out of her reach, and looks away.

“Okay, okay, fine! It was a bicycle. The perp stole a bicycle and rammed me with it and I hit the ground really hard.”

Amy couldn’t help but giggle behind her hands, but Jake didn’t look genuinely angry, just gently annoyed as he turned back to look at her. She could handle that.

The cab turned down her street, ticking past the numbers until her apartment.

“If we’re going for embarrassing injuries, you remember the rollerblading one.” Amy points to her hairline, where she knows a long thin white scar snakes across. Jake’s mock-annoyance melts into a huge goofy grin.

“Oh my god, yes,” he says, brushing her hair back from her face, so he can see the crooked line better. The rollerblading story was a throwback to another classic Santiago-Peralta competition as a desperate attempt to try and keep their petty squabbles outside of the bullpen. Undercover at a rink trying to gather intel on a smuggling ring, and it somehow ended with Amy cracking her head open despite the helmet, blood trickling down her forehead in thin streams, but cheering nonetheless because she’d tumbled straight over the finish-line.

_Technically_, it was Jake’s fault, for challenging them to a race when they really should have been monitoring a perp, but withering under Sarge’s admonishments afterwards had made her want to be swallowed whole by the earth. The memory always makes her smile though, because she still _won _dammit, and she catches herself smiling again as Jake peers at her forehead looking for the scar. He’s cupping her face in his hands, and there’s a flicker of guilt in his eyes, and she can feel her smile slipping as she wants to tell him, no wait, this is a good memory, don’t worry-

And the cab jolts to a halt.

Jake snatches his hands away as if he’s been burned, and Amy can feel the cool air on her face as she opens the cab door. She pauses, holding the door open, equal parts impulsive and nosey and tipsy, but most of all, not wanting to leave it weird like this.

“Are you-” he asks, at exactly the same time as she asks “Do you-” The pause seems to stretch out forever, and Amy’s acutely aware of the cab driver’s meter ticking over. Jake passes the driver a pile of crumpled notes and clambers out of the car, both of them watching in silence as it pulls away.

“You don’t have to-” he says, as she says “Don’t worry about-”. The tension is palpable as they stand on the sidewalk, the cold night air sobering after the haze of Shaw’s. 

“You first,” Jake says, smirking, running a hand through his hair. _Nervous tic_, she thinks, not for the first time. She wouldn’t be a good detective if she hadn’t noticed that. That’s what she tells herself anyway, filed away under ‘things she knows about Jake that surely everyone else has noticed, right?’

“Don’t worry about the whole rollerblading thing,” she says, as if this hadn’t all happened the best part of two years ago, as if they haven’t just spent the last ten minutes scrutinizing eachother in the back of a cab. “I won after all.”

He laughs out loud at that, but she can hear how strained it is. “I mean, crossing the finish-line head-first is a bold strategy, but I guess you did.” A tiny pause, hanging in the moonlight. She starts to move towards the door, hand fishing in her purse for her keys.

“I still win overall though, on account of being shot twice,” he quips, the competition still not over. She turns to him, eyebrow raised. _What are you doing?_ that little voice in her head asks her, the one that’s always warning her to be careful, the one that plans every sentence and shudders at spontaneity. _What’s going on?_

“Wait, _twice?_” she says incredulously, opening the apartment door, because it’s cold and this conversation’s regaining its traction and she’s having _fun_. He hovers by the threshold, and she waves him in out of the cold, as if this happens all the time.

“I knew about the shoulder one, that meth dealer down by the docks who kept hiding his stash inside the salmon?”

And he’d had to wear a sling which made him look badass for the first 30 seconds and then made him a massive hinderance for the following months, watching as he typed up his reports with one finger on one hand and complained repeatedly about it.

“Do you want a drink?” she asks as they tumble into her apartment, tracking city grime onto the pristine carpet. They probably shouldn’t keep going, but it’s been a _good day_ and Amy’s desire for knowledge about what happened to Jake is undercutting everything else that’s telling her to call it a night.

“One more beer couldn’t hurt,” he shrugs, toeing off his shoes by the door. And as they nurse their beers on the couch, the competition begins again in earnest.

“So, this is the shoulder one,” he says, pulling his shirt to one side, his jacket flung carelessly over the back of the couch. Amy peers closer at the starburst cicatrix just next to his left collarbone. The beer is making her dangerously bold, and she catches herself reaching out to touch it. “And it goes right through!” She knew that, he’s told her about this battle wound before, but there’s something about the sprawling knot of scar tissue at the back where the bullet tore through which makes her concede that it’s pretty cool.

“And then _this _was the real pain in the ass.” He pulls up his shirt, showing an expanse of skin, pockmarked with a constellation of small puckered scars down one side. “I mean pain in the side.” 

Amy puts down her beer at that, the curiosity just too much to handle.

“Was that a shotgun?” she asks, peering at the scars, trying to count up the little grooves where every pellet must have lodged. He grinned broadly, running his fingers over them, and before she knows it, she’s touching them too, his skin warm under her fingertips and he just looks so damn proud of himself.

“Just got clipped, it missed everything important. Happened during door duty. Y’know like how sometimes you get the occasional weirdo? Well, I just happened to get an extremely jumpy old lady.” Amy burst out laughing, taking another swig.

“So _that’s _why I haven’t heard about this one before!” She puts her bottle down on the coffee table and rucks up her shirt to match, trying and failing not to notice how his eyes track over her body.

“Well, you haven’t seen my knife wounds,” she announces, proudly running her hand over two thick slashes to one side of her belly button. And then he’s leaning close and he’s touching them too, gently, reverently. He whistles lowly.

“Wow,” he murmurs, and Amy can tell he’s trying to puzzle out the story behind them. Sober Amy would definitely be flustered over the amount of physical contact and, quite frankly, exposed flesh which is happening right now, but five-drink Amy is more concerned with how to frame this story so as to sound as badass as possible, but not to worry Jake.

“Don’t worry, they weren’t trying to steal my kidneys. I just got cornered by a perp as a beat cop and I wasn’t fast enough.” It had been early on in her career, almost entirely fresh out of the Academy, and although it hadn’t been that serious, the ugliness of the scarring was a constant reminder of how she had to bring her A-game at all times.

Under Jake’s hands, those ugly slashes, those reminders of her failure, seemed to melt away under his touch.

“Oh man, knife wounds, not being fast enough, I’ve got this covered!” And before she knows it, he’s rucked his shirt off over his head and is reaching around to point at a long thin slash diagonally down his back. “It’s not as awesome as yours, but this is what happens when you don’t realize a dude’s ceremonial katana on his wall is real.”

“When did this happen?” she asks, running her hands down the scar, she can’t help it now, this is all important information she needs to file away, and when she’s this drunk, her hands have got to do the documenting for her. The scar is old, and faint, and his skin is warm to the touch. He laughs sheepishly, hand through his hair once again. He turns to face her, and she pulls her hands back, unsure what to do with them now.

“High school. This is what happens when your friends are weird goths, and there’s always one with a sword collection, and you thought he bought it off the internet but nope that’s a real sword he’s got mounted there on the wall.” She can tell from the rush of words that he’s nervous, and she attempts to nod thoughtfully, trying to mask her horror and failing spectacularly.

“It’s a real problem,” she chokes out, trying not to let her mind linger on the memory of her fingers tracing the barely perceptible stripe down his back, trying to forget where it dips into the taut muscle between his shoulders, surprisingly strong from all the years of police calisthenics.

Because suddenly, they’re all square, tied for bullet-wounds and bad memories from work, and stupid injuries suffered in the face of competition, and stupid injuries from high school-

And now he’s brushing at the one on her face again, running his fingers over the thin scar across her hairline and she’s staring back at him, acutely aware of how his shirt hangs half-open, buttoned-up all wrong. The purple bruising across his cheek is a dark shadow in the half-light, and she suddenly remembers how this night all started, and now they’re touching eachother in her apartment, and they’re both really far gone.

She reaches out to cup his cheek, the smooth unblemished one, careful not to touch any of the parts that hurt, and there’s that tension again, hovering over the precipice of the unknown. Her mental binder about Jake that sober Amy would never admit to keeping is now brimming with information, and the gap between them is so small that she can smell his aftershave and the cheap beer on his breath, she can see the freckles flecked across his nose, and how he’s looking at her for confirmation, like one comment and he’d be fully clothed and in a cab before she could even blink.

And it’s been a _good day, _goddammit.

She closes the gap between them, pressing her lips to his. He kisses her back.

**Author's Note:**

> drink responsibly kiddos.


End file.
